Rebecca Dunham

Side profile of writer Rebecca Dunham.
Rebecca Dunham’s debut poetry collection The Miniature Room, which won the 2006 T.S. Eliot Prize, opens with a epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: “The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” It serves as an appropriate ars poetica for Dunham, since her poetry, as Edward Byrne has written, “continually examines the smallest details that might be overlooked if not magnified under the lens of her poetic lines.” Byrne continues, “[I]n fact, if readers recall [that] one of the definitions for ‘stanza’ in its original Italian is ‘room,’ the poetic connection between the intimate spaces of our surroundings and the compact language Dunham presents . . . seems even more apparent.” Eloquent attention to detail characterizes the poem

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Dunham received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University and her PhD from the University of Missouri–Columbia. Her poetry appears widely in journals, including AGNI, The Indiana Review, The Antioch Review, and FIELD. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This animation was created by Joseph Hrdina, and Dunham reads.